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I first encountered Mary McCarthy not through her novels or criticism but through her political reporting. A former editor recommended that I read “The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits” before covering Paul Manafort’s arraignment in 2017. (Were we ever so young?) I loved McCarthy’s witty cameos of malefactors—behold Maurice Stans, Nixon’s erstwhile Secretary of Commerce, “a silver-haired, sideburned super-accountant and magic fund-raiser, who gave a day-and-a-half-long demonstration of the athletics of evasion, showing himself very fit for a man of his age.” McCarthy’s sentences were like mousetraps, snapping shut on both visual information and something deeper, the kind of quintessence that fictional characters possess and that we often long for real people to have, too.

In January, 1970, The New Yorker published McCarthy’s “One Touch of Nature,” a tour-de-force essay that stretched across nineteen pages and was animated by a simple question: What happened to nature imagery in fiction? McCarthy contends that novels have drifted far from “when the skill of an author was felt to be demonstrated by his descriptive prowess”—Dickens’s London fogs, Melville’s Pacific. Now, she observes, “rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys” are thin on the literary ground.

The technical term for the piece—a loose, sprawling, associative freestyle, in which McCarthy seemingly wheels through as many proper nouns and pithy summaries as she can—is a “riff.” It spans movements (classicism, Romanticism, modernism), regions (Continental Europe, England, the U.S.), and art forms (painting, poetry, fiction). McCarthy aims to account for nature’s mutable presence across three centuries of Western cultural production. As she proceeds, grudges are revived: “What betrays the bad faith of Hemingway is the invariable intrusion of the social into a natural context.” Politicians are etherized: Joseph McCarthy’s vision of the outdoors is “doubtless based on a frozen-food locker.” Opinions are tossed in the manner of house keys. Zola is “the only Naturalist to have a real conception of Nature.”

A reader trusts this voice instinctively, charmed by its opaline assessments and zinging aperçus, forgiving a shortage of textual evidence because each claim feels spot-on. “The characteristic of truth for Tolstoy was its recognizability,” McCarthy submits. “The truth (compare Socrates) is what we have ‘always’ known.” Still, one can quibble. “The novel (unlike the tale) is a social medium,” she declares with perfect confidence. Twelve pages in, we’re told that, “at this point, a definition”—of nature—“is called for.” At this point?

Like novelistic interludes concerning pine forests, McCarthy’s breed of criticism feels endangered. The breezy authority, the absurd plenitude: these qualities suggest a more hospitable era for the printed word, even if you prefer today’s careful efficiency. That McCarthy rarely bothers to explain her voluminous references evokes a time when the writer’s job was less to make thinking easy than to make it rewarding. “One Touch of Nature” supplies the loveliness it praises, pausing to describe “the still, ribbony roads leading nowhere” in paintings by the Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael (whereas the essay itself is a snarl of colored lines on an M.T.A. map, leading everywhere at once) and “the snow in ‘The Dead’ falling softly over Ireland, a universal blanket or shroud.” As McCarthy surveys her subject, she conjures a living artistic ecosystem that is constantly evolving, including in its relationship to the natural world. The subtext is that this system, like the carbon-based one, is beautiful and worth attending to; McCarthy, novelist that she is, encrypts her themes on the way to elucidating them.

“One Touch of Nature” bursts with so much virtuosity and élan that you might forget it’s a whodunnit, out to solve the mystery of why organic scenery has gone missing from fiction. But, in the final paragraphs, McCarthy provides an answer. “Nature,” she writes, “is no longer the human home”—thanks to technology, which has become “the No. 1 opponent of human society.” This turn feels especially haunting in 2025, when much of contemporary life has migrated online and A.I.’s devastating environmental impact is only beginning. One wonders what McCarthy would make of our moment, in which runaway machines seem poised to further degrade both nature and art, alongside her own profession of literary criticism. Surely she’d have some choice words. ♦

One Touch of Nature

The absence of plot from the modern novel is often commented on, but nobody has called attention to the disappearance of another element—as though nobody missed it.

Chloé Zhao’s astonishing career has been a series of hairpin turns. Born in Beijing, in 1982, she wound up at New York University’s film school, where she studied under Spike Lee. Starting in 2015, she directed three small-scale, slow-burn features set in the American heartland: “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” “The Rider,” and “Nomadland.” All three capture the expansive beauty of the West—in particular South Dakota, with its moonlike badlands and wide, grassy plains—while using local nonprofessional actors to achieve documentary-like naturalism. “Nomadland,” about a rootless gig worker living in her van, mixed in two established stars, Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, and in 2021 won the Oscar for Best Picture. Zhao also won Best Director, becoming the first woman of color to win the category. How did this young Chinese filmmaker so effortlessly encapsulate middle America’s underclass? Before you could answer that question, Zhao was making a Marvel movie—“Eternals”—with the likes of Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek playing immortal beings shooting lasers out of their eyes.

“Eternals” was an unloved entry in the M.C.U. canon, but it retained some of the spiritual, searching quality that infused Zhao’s indie neo-Westerns. Now another twist: her newest film, “Hamnet,” is a period drama set in Elizabethan England. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel, it imagines the answer to a devastating mystery: What, if anything, did the death of William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, at age eleven, have to do with his writing of “Hamlet,” just a few years later? (The spellings of the two names were interchangeable, and yet a number of plays, including the frolicsome “Much Ado About Nothing,” came in between.) Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), however, is a secondary character; the film belongs to his wife, Agnes Shakespeare (also known as Anne Hathaway), played by Jessie Buckley, in a performance that is already considered a front-runner in the Best Actress race. Meanwhile, Zhao has just shot the pilot for a revival of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

All this may sound peripatetic. But, to hear Zhao tell it, her artistic trajectory makes perfect sense, guided by her yearning for nature, for spiritual sustenance, for truth. She’s described herself as a student of Carl Jung and Hindu tantra, and she speaks in metaphors and mysticism, even when discussing the M.C.U. Recently, she joined me at the New Yorker offices to talk about “Hamnet,” her childhood love of manga, the link between microbudget Westerns and superhero blockbusters, and how neurodivergence has shaped her way of seeing the world. Our conversation, part of which you can hear on The New Yorker Radio Hour, has been edited and condensed.

I know that you don’t come to this film as a Shakespeare scholar, but I thought we should start with what we do know about Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and his relationship to “Hamlet.” What’s the historical nugget that this comes from?

My loyalty is to Maggie O’Farrell’s book, and she’s done a lot of research. When she was in high school studying Shakespeare, her teacher mentioned that his son was named Hamnet, and then “Hamlet” was written a few years after he died. Maggie thought, It must be the most natural thing that Hamnet would have been mentioned in all the writings about Shakespeare’s life and his work, but it’s rarely mentioned. So, for many years she has been wanting to bring this little boy forward.

How did this book make its way to you?

I was driving through New Mexico to the Telluride Film Festival, and that’s when Amblin [Steven Spielberg’s production company] called me about this project. The reception was in and out, and they were saying that it’s about Shakespeare’s wife and the death of their son. I just thought, There are so many things in that sentence that I have no personal connection to, so I said no. Then, a few hours later, I met Paul Mescal for the first time [at Telluride]. I didn’t know who he was, because I had not seen “Normal People”—his career changed a lot in a short amount of time. But I sat next to the creek with him, and I just felt something about him. There’s a simmering discomfort in him, like an animal, like a steppenwolf, that just wants to burst out. That’s why he creates. I asked him, “Would you ever consider playing young Shakespeare?” And he said, “Wait, are you talking about ‘Hamnet’? I loved the book so much! You have to read the book.”

What about the book, when you read it, made you feel like you were the right person to do the film?

I still wasn’t sure if I was right. Only lately have I thought, I guess I was the right person. You just don’t know. You have to look for signs that are saying, “Yes, you are,” and these synchronicities, these signs, are where I create from. It’s O.K. to have that doubt. When I read the book, I thought the internal landscape was so beautifully described. Usually I have to really get to know, say, Brady [Jandreau] from “The Rider,” for such a long period of time to understand his internal landscape, so that then I can externalize it onscreen. But Maggie had already done that work for all of the characters. I thought, That’s my blueprint. And there’s a rhythm to the way she writes. It has a heartbeat to it—very similar to me. I found out later that her favorite filmmaker is Wong Kar-wai, whose work made me want to make films many years ago.

The external landscape in the film is so vivid. Your first three features are shot in the American West, while much of “Hamnet” takes place in a forest. You shot in Wales and Herefordshire. Can you tell me about finding those locations and what resonated with you about this very different natural landscape?

The natural world has been a big part of every film I’ve done, and I can now, in my forties, look back and say the reason is because I have always had a deep fear of death, and that drives my creativity. When you are afraid to die, you are not able to live fully. I know that deep inside. At night, when the light goes off, I lie there—I know I am not living my life fully, because I’m so terrified. I don’t feel safe in this world. When you go into nature, you develop a very embodied spirituality that is not reliant on anyone else. It’s a safety that you feel when you become one with your surroundings. All of our great prophets go into nature to come back with a message. So that’s part of working on my own shit.

In my thirties, I was much more like a pioneer: going west, finding treasures. I wanted to go as wide as possible, chasing horizon after horizon. The camera’s insatiable. It wants to capture everything. I was always on the move. Then, in my forties, after a midlife crisis, I realized that I can’t keep running from myself. And the forest is the opposite of the plains. The forest is deeply feminine. It makes you stay still, and when you stay still you have nowhere to go but into the underworld—and into yourself, where all your shadows are.

When I first visited the forest in Wales with my cinematographer, Łukasz [Żal], we wanted to find a language for the film, or just let the forest tell us what the film is about, beyond what we read in the book. I was in Kyiv right before that, with someone who was making a documentary about a strip of forest on the front line. When I left Kyiv and went to Wales, and it was this beautiful spring forest that we were in, I was getting some footage from the front line in Ukraine, and I would see these dark, black holes in the ground, and sometimes they’re land mines. And then I would walk around our forest in Wales and see these natural-made black holes. I had such a big emotional reaction to it. I started crying. I sat next to this black void, because it’s coming for all of us. No matter how unimaginable what is happening in the world, there is the bittersweetness of the great equalizer in the end. In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare wrote, “All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity.” To me, that eternity is love. So, then Łukasz runs over and goes, “I understand this! We must film this hole!” I was, like, Ah, this is what the film is about. We consider nature a department head. It’s constantly working with us.

This is a movie about a mother’s grief for her son. You’ve said that part of your hesitancy to take it on was that you are not a mother. How did you imagine your way into that grief and what it would look like for Agnes Shakespeare?

There’s a scene in the film when Hamnet dies and she lets out this very guttural scream. We can’t measure grief. Grief has no edges and yet many colors. I can never come in and say, “This is my vision of what grief should look like,” or “I’ve talked to a hundred mothers, and we’ve decided this is what it looks like.” The rawest human truth, I believe, exists only in this moment, right here, right now. That may be challenged a few years from now, and I’m open to that. But right now I create a container, an environment to allow Jessie to hold that tension between knowing and not knowing, consciousness and unconsciousness. Her body’s like a lightning conductor. Only when you hold tension long enough can the answer for “To be or not to be?” come through.

So, after a few different setups, that scream came out of her. She wasn’t planning on it. I wasn’t planning on it. But, in that moment, she wasn’t an actress; she was a channeller.

Jessie Buckley gives an astounding performance. People are saying that the Best Actress race is all locked up. Let the record show Chloé is crossing fingers on both hands.

Selfishly!

One of your characters is William Shakespeare. This is not the witty, hyperverbal Shakespeare of “Shakespeare in Love.” He’s actually a man of few words: brooding, frustrated. How did you and Maggie approach the challenge of writing lines for William Shakespeare?

I think the reason why the producers and Maggie chose me is because I don’t feel that way about William Shakespeare. I do have reverence, intellectually, but I don’t have the burden on my shoulders, as many people in the West do. Maybe the same as I am with cowboys and Westerns. I watched only two and a half Westerns when I made “The Rider.” But I watched more afterward, because I fell in love with it. I’ll probably do more Shakespeare-related things after this. But I didn’t come in feeling that he’s any different than any other man who fell in love with a woman and couldn’t quite express his feelings. The pressure is on the actors—it’s on Paul, who does have a lot of reverence! In the sense of not only what we put him through, not only playing William Shakespeare, but also telling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as William Shakespeare.

He’s very different than in the book. Maggie reminded me a couple weeks ago, “Do you remember in the book he’s quite talkative?” I made a decision to change his character, because I find a lot of artists—male artists—get into expressing themselves in their art because they never felt safe to express their emotions in real life, in our society. As a little boy, they’re told to toughen up. There’s no space for your emotions, because mom is crying, or your sister’s crying. I was raised by men like that. I have loved and been loved by men like that my whole life, so it just became natural for me. And Paul was part of that decision as well. Watching him, there’s him in this character as well. I can only work that way, because, moment by moment, I need to feel love toward this character, and I need to feel like I understand him. And there’s a part of me that’s like him. I feel safe in my fantasy world on set. Then I can deal with emotional situations in life.

This movie, among other things, is about the act of creation. I’m curious if you saw yourself in the process that Shakespeare goes through.

Yes, I do, but not as good as him! Let’s put it on record. It’s an uncomfortable process. It is extremely uncomfortable to be in the “To be or not to be” space. A great surfer would tell you about that liminal space, when a big wave is coming and they’re sitting there, this moment when life and death is pulling you that tight—or, in this case, grief. As artists, when we sit in that crucible, when we sit in that alchemical fire long enough, it’s going to come. But it’s very uncomfortable to sit in it.

You mentioned that you didn’t grow up with the reverence for Shakespeare that is instilled in the West. Was he taught in school in Beijing?

I wouldn’t say there was no reverence. The word Shā shì bǐ yà, which is his name in Chinese, sounds like royalty—very upper class, highly intellectual. Very few can understand or are allowed to. So it’s quite satisfying to demystify that. This is just a man who’s lived a life, and who, at least in our version, cannot quite put order to his chaos.

What kind of art was important to you when you were a young person?

I have to be honest: it was manga. In a way, my early education was always in myth, symbols, fantastical storytelling, allegorical storytelling. I use a lot of metaphors—volcanoes, black holes. I think it’s because metaphors help me understand and process all these difficult emotions and complicated things about what is happening in the world. That’s why myth is so important. Nowadays, I’m a student of Carl Jung. It’s all about symbols and metaphors. That’s not that different from my obsession with manga when I was young.

Tell me more about manga. Is there an example of something that captured you?

Manga is quite different from American comics. Manga is heavily influenced by Japanese Shintoism—believing that every object has a spirit. It gave me comfort to understand that we all contain within ourselves something other than what I see. That’s the kind of subtle spirituality I craved growing up, in a country where we didn’t have religion the way Americans do, or the rest of the world. Japan, since the Meiji Restoration, has been interacting with the West the way no other countries in Asia were doing at the time, so manga also reflects that. And then, thirdly, morality in manga very much exists in the gray area. It celebrates the shadows as much as the light. In American comics, sometimes that can be black-and-white, in terms of what’s good or evil.

Your father was an executive at a major state-owned Chinese steel company. Your stepmother, Song Dandan, is a famous sitcom actress. I’ve heard her described as the Roseanne of China.

She’s very funny.

So you grew up in what sounds like a rarified echelon in China. I’m curious how you would describe the Beijing of your childhood, a place that was rapidly transforming and industrializing—and your father was directly connected to that industrialization.

My father’s job is not that special. He was a government official, and most people in China work for the government. I was fifteen when I left, and that’s around the time my dad married my stepmother. It’s also around the time when China really sped up its development, so, every time I would come back from the U.K. or America, I would not recognize anything. My memory of Beijing is always the one from my childhood, which no longer exists.

Which was what?

Imagine there’s no telephone wires, no cars on the street. Forget about the internet. There was not much infrastructure. And we didn’t have a lot of connection to the outside world, so we were sort of in a snow globe. I mention snow, because I always remember the snowy winters there, and that’s when Chinese New Year is. You could walk to your grandmother’s house, and everyone knew everyone. I felt very safe within that community. I remember the first time MTV showed up on television, or watching “The Terminator” or listening to Michael Jackson for the first time, and going, What is this world outside the snow globe? Like in any myth, when you know there’s a world out there, you start to have yearnings. There was an age of innocence that I experienced. It doesn’t mean that there was no grief, no pain, no loneliness—there was all of that. But also innocence.

Did your family experience a change in wealth at that time?

There’s talk of my family being billionaires, and that is so far from the truth. Things happened very fast for a lot of people, extreme wealth, and my family’s not one of them. I’ve seen a lot of tragedies that came from that. We weren’t swept away by the economic boom. We had the equivalent to a middle-class income in America, but it was considered very comfortable in China. It allowed me to study abroad. When things change that fast in any society, it doesn’t have a solid foundation. Spirituality, a connection with something bigger, something rooted in our ancestors—when that is lacking and you suddenly are given a huge amount of material goods, there is a hunger that can never be fulfilled. And artists put their lives on the line to create, because we feel that void.

You’ve always forged your own path. But was there a conventional path that you were expected to follow? What did your parents want you to do?

You’re really digging on the parents, aren’t you?

I’m digging on what made you an artist.

I can be super honest about this: I’m not close to them. I was quite a rebellious young person. Everything my parents said or did, I was, like, I’m going to do the opposite. My parents walked a fine line between not very present and also letting me be who I am. I became a storyteller because I needed to make sense of what I was experiencing. It was not an easy childhood, and that is because my parents didn’t have easy childhoods. Neither did their parents. Stuff gets passed down. They didn’t really mind what I did. I hear stories of people whose parents say, “You’ve got to be a doctor,” or “You’ve got to be a lawyer.” There’s a safety in that container. I had no container growing up. I’m that black hole. I needed my father, or the masculine consciousness in my mother, to step up and say, “Here is order. Here are the banks of the flood, so your water can calm down and go deep.” I didn’t have that. I was spinning in my chaos until I found the language of cinema.

What shape did your rebelliousness take?

I would climb out of the window when the teacher turned around so I could get to the basketball courts, because there were only a few available, so you had to get there as soon as the bell rings. I would literally jump out of the window. And of course I’d get caught, and I’d get detention. Things like that.

You left China at fifteen to go to Brighton College, a boarding school in England, and then wound up in L.A. at nineteen, living in a studio apartment in Koreatown near a Sizzler—is that correct?

Yeah, on Virgil. That Sizzler’s still there.

L.A. is a really difficult place for anyone to show up and make a life. What was your plan?

There was no plan. I just wanted to get to America, because I saw it in the movies. I was going to go to St. Andrews and study painting. Then, when I was given the opportunity to go to America, I thought L.A., because that’s where Hollywood is. But, of course, when I got there, in 1999, I thought, This is not what I’ve seen in the movies. I had no idea about America. That is why I ended up studying American politics in college.

Right, at Mount Holyoke.

Yes. And my third day at school was when 9/11 happened. Many of the people in our department went into international politics, but I was only a year into being in America, and my English was not the best. I was wondering, Why did this happen? So I remained in the American-politics department, because I wanted to understand this picture-perfect country that I saw in movies. That’s when I fell in love with it, because it was now real.

You wound up at N.Y.U. film school, and one of your professors was Spike Lee. What did you learn from him?

I had one class with him. We would get into massive arguments in his office. I think that’s what I learned from him: Just be yourself. Because he’s so himself—painfully so, sometimes. Beautifully and painfully so. Whenever I’m with him, I can just be myself—beautifully and painfully so. Sometimes we would go at each other. But I prefer that. A lot of professors would be overly nurturing, to the point where I wasn’t sure if the compliment was real or not. If you get a compliment from Spike, you know you’ve done something right.

Your first three features took place, at least in part, in the American West—the land of rodeos and cowboys and open plains and mountains and sunsets. The first two, “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” and “The Rider,” were set in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota. How did you discover this part of America?

I remember deciding, in New York, what to do for my first film. I never take it for granted that people’s precious time will be used to watch my films. You go to a film festival, and the brochure has hundreds of films in it. Why would anybody come see yours? At the time, I knew that I could never make a better film in New York than the people already here making them. Of course, there was, I now understand, a yearning to go to nature, having been in big cities my whole life. But I remember seeing an image taken by Aaron Huey, a photographer for National Geographic. He walked across America and took photos. One picture was of a Lakota boy with a bandanna and a Tupac T-shirt, sitting bareback on a big horse at the Big Bat’s gas station in Pine Ridge, with a cigarette in his hand and the beautiful plains behind him. I went, That’s America. That’s how beautiful and complex and heartbreaking this country is. I thought, Somebody will look at that image in the festival brochure and go, “I’ll see that!” I drove out to South Dakota because of that picture.

Those early films are cast with people from that world—I hesitate to call them non-actors, because they act so beautifully in the films.

Nonprofessional actors, we say.

I’m curious, particularly at the reservation, how you won the trust of the people there. There’s a fraught history of Native Americans being portrayed in movies, and you come along as a profound outsider.

Do you feel like you can trust me?

You’re very open and easy to talk to, so I would say yes.

Well, I’m curious. That’s probably it. Sometimes people go to these communities, and they have an idea about what they want to say about the world, and these communities become a tool for getting a message across. Nobody wants to be an issue or a museum piece. Nobody wants to be known just for their trauma. And sometimes, when you go there, that’s the first thing they perform for you. I wait for that to be over. “Yeah, yeah, but what’s your favorite football team? When’s the last time you cried?” You just have to be curious about the other person, and also not have an agenda.

The star of “The Rider,” Brady Jandreau, was a real rodeo cowboy who was injured and then got back on the horse, literally. That’s the story of the movie, as well. Similarly, the main character in “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” is weighing whether to leave the reservation. And Frances McDormand’s character in “Nomadland” is a wanderer, and when you see her in a guest bedroom in a house you feel as uncomfortable as she is. Was that sense of rootlessness something that you were exploring about yourself?

They all share a commonality, which is that the characters lose something that makes them no longer able to be who they thought they were, and they have to go through a journey to discover who they truly are. That is probably what was happening to me. In my forties, I understood that sometimes the answer is not outside. Sometimes you have to descend into yourself to do that same journey. But that’s even more uncomfortable—as everything is when you go into the second half of your life.

“Nomadland” is a kind of hybrid film, where for the first time you had two stars, Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, alongside people like Linda May and Bob Wells, who were in Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book “Nomadland.” How did your directing style differ from one to the other?

Fran is like an alien. The ability to act in the moment—she understands what it takes. When I had forty minutes to shoot in magic hour and a bunch of nonprofessional actors, I would have to do their coverage first. But, in order to cut, I needed various reactions from Fran. So a lot of times it was me doing all these takes with our nonprofessional actors and then going, “Fran, there’s forty-five seconds left, and I need these five expressions. Go!” And she goes. That was probably the hardest four months of her life. When it came to Paul and Jessie in “Hamnet,” I needed to make sure I gave them the most comfortable environment to be where Fran was for four months doing “Nomadland.”

O.K., but in between you made quite a left turn, into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And it’s not like you won the Academy Award for “Nomadland” and then were handed a Marvel movie.

No, Kevin [Feige, the president of Marvel Studios] hired me based on “The Rider”! I hadn’t shot “Nomadland” yet.

What was the budget of “The Rider”?

Eighty thousand dollars.

And what was the budget of “Eternals”?

I think two hundred fifty?

Million. Let’s clarify.

Million. I know. What a dream. I mean, crazy.

How did this come about?

I remember walking into Marvel Studios, to the conference room where I went in to pitch, and I had exported my video with the wrong ratio, so it looked really bad on the screen. And Kevin walks in, and everybody sits down, and I’m standing there. The next day, I’m supposed to get into my van to start shooting “Nomadland.” I just went, “To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower! To hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour!” They’re, like, “Beautiful!” And I said, “This is how Sersi sees humanity. One human being contains a universe, and I want to make a film about our relationship with the divine.” And I can see Kevin going, Interesting . . .

Talk about going from non-actors to professionals! You’re now working with Angelina Jolie and Kumail Nanjiani and Harry Styles. How did you have to adjust to that level of stardom?

It is not not intimidating to meet Angelina Jolie for the first time. I actually have a tattoo, on my back, because she had one—the dragon she used to have here. [Shows her forearm.] I was twenty-two. And she had hers removed, eventually. I showed mine to her when I met her, and I said, “But you had yours removed.” She said, “Now it’s yours.” When I went into “Eternals,” all my childhood fantasies came true, wanting to be a manga artist. A huge amount of my attention went into the world-building. I’m not saying that I wasn’t there for my actors, but they’re playing archetypal characters. It wasn’t that complicated when it came to working with them on set.

On the one hand, you were now working with a budget that was bigger than anything you’d ever had by an order of many magnitudes, which affords a certain freedom. If you wanted a claw to emerge from the sea, you could do that. On the other hand, you’re working within this big corporate machine, where every movie is connected to every other movie, and there’s a big budget but also a big expectation of the financial performance of the film. Was it freeing or less freeing to be working in that milieu?

I’ve always only said one version of that answer and it’s never satisfying to people, but the truth is it’s not different from making “The Rider” to me. At the end of the day, I’m interacting with the few people around me: producers, my D.P., my actors. If you have good producers, they’ll keep it that way. On “Nomadland,” I had twenty-seven people around me, and on “Eternals” I had twenty-seven people around me. They just had massive armies around them. I also had a fearlessness going into “Eternals,” because it was right after “Avengers: Endgame.” “Eternals” was supposed to be this little artsy kid in the corner in the cafeteria. “Eternals” as a comics property has always been the weird one. Then the pandemic came, and the Marvel continuation stopped. Suddenly, “Eternals” was this big thing coming back. That break, I think, made us all yearn for what we were familiar with.

The film is very existential. I spent ten years learning about humanity, making my first three films. “Eternals,” at the end of the day, is about a pantheon of gods discussing the nature of humanity, like an old Greek play. It was a big eruption that came out of me, for better or for worse. It took me four years to contain that, cool it down, and excavate, in the shape of “Hamnet.”

“Eternals” got a rocky reception. You mention the fandoms—fandoms are tricky, because they have a certain expectation.

I’m one of them, so I can understand where they’re coming from.

You just wrapped directing the pilot of the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” revival, so you’re once again working on a franchise with a very intense fandom.

I’m also one of them!

As you move forward in your career, how do you see your relationship with the franchise-driven part of Hollywood? It’s only getting harder to make a movie that isn’t based on something or connected to some form of I.P. You could call William Shakespeare I.P., in a way.

I thought about his sellability when I signed up. Both Maggie’s book and him. It’s pretty strong I.P. we’re dealing with here. I just made an announcement, with my producing partner, Nick Gonda, that we’ve teamed up with Kodansha, which is the oldest and one of the largest manga publishing houses in Japan. They have everything from “Akira” to “Ghost in the Shell” to “Attack on Titan.” We just teamed up with them to launch Kodansha Studios, which means that we will be developing live-action adaptations of their I.P. in-house before it goes to the studios. I’ve always dreamed of being a bridge between the East and the West, and to create a safe and nurturing garden, in a way, for international filmmakers and Japanese manga artists to come together. Why did this artist create this story in Japan? What is really the core of it? And then allow them to work together to develop the screenplay, until the shoots of the plants are strong enough, and then we go to our studio partners. I think adapting from I.P. is beautiful. I started my career as a fan-fiction writer in China.

Really?

A pretty well-known one, too. But you’ll never know, because I’ll never share my pen name. I think “original” is misunderstood in the modern world. “Original” means going back to the source. But our modern culture is so obsessed with new things. It’s a very masculine-dominated way of looking at the world. Must have new things all the time. In nature, everything goes back to the source. So I don’t mind working with I.P. It’s just that how we do it could be healthier, more wholesome.

You’ve described yourself as “deeply neurodivergent,” and you’ve talked about how you can become overstimulated and shut down. A director on a set has to deal with so many people, departments, questions, images. How does that challenge you or help you on a movie set?

I didn’t have my official diagnosis until this year. In the past, I always wondered, Maybe I’m just built wrong. Something is off with me. And going to premières or press days is even harder. I feel a lot of shame around, Why I can’t enjoy it like the people around me? Once I had some language around it, it was very empowering. The fact that I’m good at some things—it’s my sensitivity, my intuition, my pattern-recognizing skills. All those things are because my brain takes in so much more information than the person next to me, so I need time to process that information. If I don’t process it, and more is coming in, then I can shut down and implode, or have massive meltdowns. Also, a really strong perfume can give me a shutdown.

So you won’t be working in Smell-O-Vision.

No, but I love anything that’s natural. It’s the chemical in the perfume that is overwhelming. Cleaning products, air fresheners, things like that. Tags on clothes—if it’s there and I can feel it, then all I can think about is this tag scratching me. On set, we do ask people to kindly not wear strong perfume. I also wanted to make sure my actors know that if I go into my tent, I need a moment. I need to put my headphones on, put a blanket over me, so I can make myself less stimulated. The last thing you want is an overstimulated director. But that time I take—five minutes here, fifteen minutes there—allows other people to take that time. How a film is made is structured as a machine that produces the most in the least amount of time, which is what a capitalist society considers good. I want to ask the question, Is the modern world too much? Is it too loud, too fast, too many chemicals? I like to think about it that way and not feel ashamed that I have to be accommodated, because I have seen the results of these very small shifts that actually help a lot of people around me as well.

Are you willing to share what the diagnosis was?

I don’t like to use labels—it’s more than one—because those labels come with the “lack of” or the “less normal.” It’s a soup of things. And I’m always going to question the truth that’s attached to that label. All I can say, the word “neurodivergent” helps. I’m more sensitive to the world. If you are smiling and telling me, “I feel great,” and you don’t feel that way, I feel it. That makes me good at working with actors but terrible at a loud dinner party where small talk is happening, because I can feel the dissonance in people.

Well, you are likely headed back to the Academy Awards, so I hope that no one is wearing strong perfume there.

[Laughs.] That’s a lost cause. ♦

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Camille Bordas reads her story “Understanding the Science,” from the December 15, 2025, issue of the magazine. Bordas is the author of four novels, including “How to Behave in a Crowd” and “The Material.” Her first story collection, “One Sun Only,” will be published in January.

It’s nearly impossible to eat a meal at Babbo, the recently revived Greenwich Village trattoria, without being pummelled by reminders of its past. This can be quite a pleasant experience. For nearly two decades, beginning in 1998, Babbo was one of the most coveted reservations in New York, reshaping how the city—and, arguably, the entire country—understood Italian cuisine and modern restaurant dining writ large. More to the point, it was just a marvellous place to be. It felt essential, intoxicating, urgent, the party-crowded bar area giving way to gracefully spacious dining rooms, the smell of rosemary and wine in the air, the honeyed lighting, the soigné service, the irreverent soundtrack of roaring classic rock. Babbo was the flagship restaurant of Mario Batali, and it became synonymous with his celebrity: charismatic, edgy, expansive, just on the edge of overwhelming. If you know any of this story, you know the rest of it. In late 2017, Batali—always a figure of larger-than-life appetites—was accused, by multiple women, of sexual misconduct. Over the next few years, he stepped back from his restaurants and retreated from public life. Most of his roughly two dozen restaurants eventually closed; Babbo remained open but failed to shake off its association with Batali’s tarnished name. The place became radioactive—you only ate there if you didn’t know about what the chef had been accused of, or if you wanted to announce that you didn’t care.

Early this year, when news emerged that the mega-restaurateur Stephen Starr was taking over Babbo and installing Mark Ladner, a former Batali deputy, at the helm, food-world group chats lit up with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation. If the goal was to preserve Babbo qua Babbo, you really couldn’t make a better pick than Ladner. He’d been a sous chef at the restaurant when it first opened, before going on to run Lupa, Batali’s ode to Roman cuisine. In 2005, he became the opening executive chef of Del Posto, a grand, enormous, Old World-inspired dining room in West Chelsea that was generally considered to be Batali’s naked play for a four-star review from the Times—which Del Posto received, eventually, in 2010. Nearly a year before Batali’s public downfall, Ladner left to launch a fast-casual restaurant, Pasta Flyer, which never managed to catch on, and he has spent the years since mostly as a gastronomic gun for hire. But perhaps no one, besides Batali himself, has a better handle on the Batali way of doing things in the kitchen. The decision to bring him back made a very particular sort of statement—the new Babbo would be a feat of selective nostalgia, an homage to a prelapsarian idyll.

Can you have Batali minus Batali? The space certainly hasn’t changed much. A renovation, under Starr’s direction, has brightened the downstairs dining room and darkened the upstairs, but for the most part the place feels just as it always did. Tight tables are still squeezed in beneath the windows of the tiled entryway. A grand staircase still anchors the downstairs dining room, with a baroquely laid service table standing at the base, around which captains and runners hover. The amber lighting still kisses diners on the cheeks and shoulders. Most uncannily, a solid portion of Ladner’s menu is Babbo Revival, a greatest-hits collection of dishes that once made the restaurant famous, or maybe vice versa. You can order an appetizer of warm lamb’s tongue; wallopy pastas such as beef-cheek ravioli with liver and truffles, or goat-cheese tortelloni dusted with fennel pollen, a favorite Batali seasoning; and fried veal sweetbreads, crisp and airy. Other now-gone pillars of the extended empire are evoked, too: A fluke crudo with puckery “tomato raisins” and sea beans summons the best of Esca, the erstwhile seafood-focussed spot in midtown; an escarole salad with walnuts and red onions was a famous Lupa starter. Ladner even brings back his own signature dish, a hundred-layer lasagna that he first developed at Del Posto. There, it was a precise rectangular cross-section. At the new Babbo, the portion is a slab as big as a ream of printer paper, priced at a hundred dollars and meant to serve four. Ladner himself might emerge from the kitchen, towering in his chef’s toque, to present it tableside, then whisk it away to a service table in the center of the dining room to portion it out, wielding an enormous mezzaluna with the summoned focus of a virtuoso at his instrument.

A trio of fish crudo evokes Esca, Batali’s late seafood-focussed restaurant in midtown.

During three recent meals at Babbo, I experienced intermittent moments of culinary magic. Garlicky, unctuously tender lamb chops scottadito, served with a tangle of chard in an ebullient puttanesca sauce; a scoop of fregola, dressed in a shrimp-infused tomato broth with vinegary wisps of artichoke, topped with enormous, tender prawns; a linguine vongole so briny and winey and rich that I wanted to drink the buttery dregs from the bowl. But too many Babbo-ish beats that ought to have been heavenly instead left me right here on earth. Calamarata, a ring-shaped pasta, wittily paired with calamari rings and served “Sicilian lifeguard style,” bizarrely lacked zing, despite the olives and capers in the sauce. A veal chop dressed with wild-mushroom marsala sauce enriched with foie gras, in contrast, tasted of little besides fat and salt. The second-most famous pasta of Batali’s heyday, “love letters” filled with merguez sausage and dressed in a tomatoey sauce with peas and mint—an inspired merging of European and North African flavors—was, in its Ladnerian update, anticlimactically lacking in spice or brightness. (By my second visit, it had disappeared from the menu.) I was disappointed by the enormous lasagna, too: the miraculous lightness of its construction was eclipsed by a charred cheese crust, inspired by Detroit-style pizza, which was so leathery that the dish arrived with steak knives. (I’ll also pedantically quibble with the lasagna’s alleged centuplicity: by my calculation, Ladner gets to a hundred by counting the sauce layers as well as the pasta sheets, which strikes me as cheating.)

From the dessert menu, a blueberry-and-blue-cheese budino.

On my first visit to the original Babbo—God, it must have been twenty years ago—I remember being stunned at my first bite of the beef-cheek ravioli. (“Of all the pasta dishes—indeed, of all the dishes—on the menu, this is probably the one most associated with Babbo,” Batali writes of the recipe, in “The Babbo Cookbook,” from 2002.) I froze. I think I stopped chewing. I was astounded that a mouthful of food could be so forceful and so silken at once. I wish I could say that I felt the same way about the version at the new Babbo. Some of the disappointment, I’m sure, had to do with the difficulty of measuring up to memory, but it was also right there on the plate. On one evening, the filling was oddly crumbly and dry, and on another the ravioli’s thick chicken-liver ragú—a striking departure from the light, buttery emulsion that dressed Batali’s original—was broken and greasy. These miscalibrations made no sense: Ladner is a known genius of noodles; even Pasta Flyer, his doomed fast-casual attempt, produced superlative food. At Babbo, he’s putting his own spin on Batali’s star dishes, as any chef of his calibre ought to, but these changes only work if they make the dishes better.

Mark Ladner plates a dish.

Why keep Babbo going at all? This, to me, is the big question. Babbo was wonderful, epoch-defining—but it was. Its revival, like any revival, is a sort of exhumation, and inevitably also a bit of an autopsy. We know what went wrong; the investigation into Batali’s misdeeds helped win the Times a Pulitzer, for goodness’ sake. The big, brash, magnificent era that came before all of that, when the island of Manhattan was studded with Batali joints, each one exploring a different facet of the cuisine of Italy, came to an abrupt and ignominious end. Starr’s Babbo might be most generously understood as an attempt to surgically separate art from artist: it asks us to revel in the heyday of Babbo, its warmth and vivacity, while studiously avoiding any acknowledgment of the man who created and embodied it. This isn’t an outlandish request—we’re great at selective sanitization; not too many Great Gatsby-themed parties feature dead bodies in the swimming pool—but in this case it’s a futile one. Batali’s presence is so strong at Babbo, even now, that his orange Crocs might as well be mounted over the door.

What this new Babbo needs to be, to own its history and to transcend it, to justify its obsession with itself, is spectacular. This is all the more true when it comes to drawing in (and bringing back!) new diners, the ones who can avoid all the uncomfortable questions surrounding the restaurant’s revival simply by not knowing its backstory at all. Maybe you weren’t following the news; I don’t know, maybe you had barely been born. You might be aware, broadly, that Babbo is important, that its reopening is noteworthy, that it’s buzzy as hell right now. And then you come in for dinner, have a nice meal and a glass of a significant Barolo or a frothy tomato Martini, and you leave thinking that Babbo is just an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, rather on the expensive side, with a lovely atmosphere, terrific service, and food that’s hit or miss. It might not stand out, especially, in the landscape of dining rooms serving terrific pastas and osso bucos and zabagliones in New York City right now. Sure, it used to be all red sauce and Sinatra in this town, but then some force took hold a couple decades ago that shook everything up, made all the richness and personality of Italian cuisine come exhilaratingly into focus. Thanks to Batali, in all sorts of ways, things will never be the same. ♦

“Everyone thinks they’re on this big journey now,” Debbie said, refilling her glass. “I’ve had it with the journey. I’ve had it with you people.”

“I don’t think I’m on a journey,” Burt said.

“Self-discovery,” Debbie added. “What a joke. Life’s too short to find out who we really are.”

It was the first time the six of them had got together for dinner in more than a year (since Maria’s diagnosis), and after such a long time (and in celebration of Maria’s remission) they’d expected to have more interesting things to tell one another, deeper things, but they were entering dessert territory now, a cake was on the table, and only superficial topics had been broached: Ervin’s promotion, Jane and Burt’s move to the suburbs, Katherine’s recent purchase of a metabolism-tracking device—a pen-shaped item and the cause of Debbie’s rant.

“How much can you know about yourself, exactly?” she said. “The therapy, the vision quests, the birth charts—do we really need the data on metabolic flexibility, too?”

Jane, in Katherine’s defense, said that, the more you knew about yourself, the more useful you could be to society.

“Bullshit,” Debbie said. “I call bullshit. Knowing whether Kat is in fat- or carb-burning mode doesn’t help anyone.”

As a result of Katherine declining cake five minutes earlier, no one had touched it. No one, Debbie included, really wanted to. They’d all overeaten already, drunk too much, made private plans to atone for it the next day. The cake presented a challenge, it sat there taunting them, and Debbie knew this, that you couldn’t serve cake to a group of fortysomethings without causing ripples, but what else could she have done? Not offered dessert? She got it, no one wanted to put on weight, but this was a gorgeous princess cake, just gorgeous, she’d had to drive all the way to Andersonville to get it from that Swedish bakery everyone talked about. Staring at it now, though, she wondered if the cake didn’t look a little bit like a tit, the smooth half sphere, the small pink marzipan flower nippling the top of it—and, oh, God, did Maria think it looked like a tit? Did Maria still have nipples? Debbie had been meaning to look it up, what exactly it was they took in a mastectomy, but she hadn’t had the nerve.

“I’m not on a journey,” Katherine said. “I just want to lose a few pounds.”

Back in the summer, she’d met a pretty famous actor at a friend’s gallery in L.A., and they’d been dating long-distance ever since. The actor was a little younger than her. She didn’t want people to think they looked wrong together. He was about to come to Chicago for a six-week shoot. It would be the first time they were in the same city for more than a few days.

Katherine changed the subject to the documentary she’d just seen, about flat-earthers, but this topic, too, made Debbie angry. Debbie’s anger at flat-earthers turned out to run deeper, in fact, than her anger at metabolism-tracking devices. It was one thing to feel the earth was flat, she said, but that anyone could believe that a secret of this magnitude could’ve been kept from the public by scientists and governments for centuries, for millennia, even—no one could keep a secret for that long. Didn’t people understand this?

“Why would Pythagoras have lied about the earth being round?” she said. “And Aristotle? And Eratosthenes? Why go to the trouble of pretending to measure the planet’s diameter, going out, planting sticks, tracking shadows?”

“Maybe they just wanted to impress their wives,” Burt said.

“Were those guys even married?” Katherine said. “Weren’t they all gay?”

Debbie rolled her eyes. She happened to know a lot about the Greek wives: Pythias had been a scientist (on her honeymoon with Aristotle, she gathered materials for an encyclopedia they were working on together); Theano (Pythagoras’ wife) had been a mathematician in her own right.

Maria hadn’t said anything in a while. It hadn’t occurred to her that the cake looked like a tit. She didn’t care how accomplished certain wives had been thirty centuries ago, and she hadn’t seen the flat-earth documentary. She couldn’t understand why such a documentary existed in the first place, why someone would bother filming idiots displaying their idiocy. There was something repulsive about it, wasn’t there? About ridiculing people, amplifying their dumb beliefs, so that upper-middle-class Chicagoans like her and her friends could feel alarmed and superior. Most things were aesthetically repulsive to her, if Maria was honest. Her aging friends certainly were. Not so much their appearance (they used the retinol creams and popped the antioxidants, they dyed their hair, they exercised) but their thoughts—had they always been so small? Maria was getting bored of them. She was getting bored of herself, too, but what could you do. You could do one thing, Maria knew, but she didn’t have the guts. And, for all that she’d thought of suicide as a teen, it had surprised her how determined she’d been to survive cancer, to see the world through. (Those were the words that had appeared in her head when she’d been diagnosed.)

“And Eratosthenes was killed by the man whose wife he was sleeping with,” Debbie said. “So maybe bisexual, all those guys, but definitely not straight-up gay.”

Who cared who’d been what and slept with whom? Maria wondered, but she knew that everyone did—everyone but her cared about those two things. She was the outlier. She was so bored that she started wondering what she would take in a fire. She knew what she would take in a fire at Katherine’s place, but what would she save from Deb and Ervin’s apartment if it went up in flames right at this moment? There wasn’t much to get excited about. Everything matched, nothing begged to be noticed. Kat’s apartment was much nicer, Maria thought. She wished they were having dinner at Kat’s. There was art on the walls there, real art, by real painters. Not painters whose names anyone recognized yet, but soon.

Kat was the best of the lot, really. After Maria’s diagnosis, Kat had offered everything she could—a shoulder to cry on, chemo drives, pharmacy runs, ice-cream deliveries. Maria said no to all, but still. She appreciated the effort. She appreciated that Kat had kept trying, too, offering stranger and stranger services as the weeks went on—she could do Maria’s nails, if she wanted, she could read to her, she could teach her piano. The idea of piano lessons offended Maria at first—that she could be expected to learn a new skill while dealing with cancer. Wasn’t cancer itself enough to learn from? she thought. What else would be asked of her? Was she supposed to master Mandarin as well? Meet new people? Yet, mere hours after the piano suggestion, Maria was in the shower, once again fighting the urge to feel the lump (Had it grown? Was it shrinking?), and when she extended her arms as far away from her body as possible, pleading with the fingers at the end of them to stay still and not touch, to refrain from palpating, from inquiring, she realized 1) how thin her fingers had become and 2) that giving them something to do might not be such a bad idea. She started going to Kat’s on Mondays and Thursdays for piano lessons, skipping only one week, when she went in for her mastectomy. Now that she was in remission, she wondered if Kat would want to keep teaching her. Already Kat was less available, but that had to do with the new boyfriend, Maria wanted to believe, not with her newly recovered health. Kat was spending more and more time with Adrian, in L.A. or on set, but she told Maria that she was free to come practice at her apartment when she was out of town—she’d given her a set of keys. Maria took advantage of Kat’s empty apartment every chance she got. Sometimes she even spent the night there, though she never told Kat when she did. She didn’t necessarily practice much piano; mostly she lay on Kat’s tufted daybed, read from Kat’s library, made tea in Kat’s enamelled-steel kettle. Every little thing Kat owned was beautiful. In a fire, Maria would’ve taken the small painting of a woman in a bathtub, which hung in the guest room.

Debbie choked on a sip of wine, and, in the few seconds it took her to catch her breath, Ervin saw an opportunity to open up the conversation. His wife could be hard to stop when she’d had a few, and she always started early when they hosted. (A first glass of wine while she gathered ingredients on the counter, a second while dinner simmered—by the time the guests arrived, she was usually four drinks ahead.) Ervin asked everyone what their favorite conspiracy theory was.

Jane said global warming. Oceans rising.

“You don’t believe in global warming?”

“I thought we were naming things other people don’t believe in,” Jane said.

“Every time I hear about oceans rising, I think about the Steven Wright joke,” Burt said. “ ‘Sponges live in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper it would be if that weren’t the case.’ ”

“Maybe the world would be saved if we grew more sponges,” Jane said.

“Or just one very big sponge,” Katherine said.

She said her favorite conspiracy theory was that Elvis was alive. Ervin said Roswell, and Burt said God, which made Maria uneasy. Not that she believed in God, but her parents had, and she’d tried it herself, a handful of times.

It was going to be her turn to share. She didn’t have a favorite conspiracy theory. What did that even mean? She thought her friends might not insist that she come up with an answer, though. One good thing about her illness was that people had mostly stopped trying to change her mind once she’d said no. Whenever she said no now, everyone assumed the no came from a place of knowledge they couldn’t access, that it was the no of someone who’d seen not exactly the future but something akin to the future, a shortcut to the end, and who knew what was worth her time and what wasn’t.

“What about you, Maria?” Ervin asked. “What’s your favorite conspiracy theory?”

She thought of her parents, who hadn’t believed in evolution, who’d tried to tell her, when she’d expressed a desire to become a paleontologist after seeing “Jurassic Park,” that fossils had been placed on earth by God in order to test people’s faith. Would her parents have called the existence of dinosaurs a conspiracy theory? Would saying “dinosaurs” be an insult to her parents’ memory?

The cake was still untouched at the center of the table.

“Why is it called a princess cake?” Maria asked, but Katherine’s phone rang before Debbie could look for an answer on the internet, and, because it was Adrian calling, everyone went quiet, trying to hear the famous actor’s voice.

“Adrian’s in town!” Katherine said.

“I thought he wasn’t coming till Sunday!” Burt said.

Adrian had taken an earlier flight to surprise Katherine, but had found no one at her place.

“Can he come over?” she asked Debbie. “Maybe he’ll eat the whole cake. Adrian can eat anything.”

The mood shifted in an instant. They were going to meet a movie star! Jane and Debbie both pretended they had to pee, and took turns in the bathroom to reapply their makeup.

When Adrian arrived, Debbie brought him a small plate and a spoon from the kitchen, even though he could’ve used any clean plate or spoon already on the table.

“This looks amazing,” Adrian said. “Did you make it yourself?”

Debbie blushed and said, “Don’t be silly.” She cut him too big a slice, and, as she did that, she thought the cake now looked worse than a tit, looked like a mangled tit. Adrian made appreciative sounds the moment the cake entered his mouth, and Maria assumed that he was acting. Not enough time had passed for flavor to register in his brain.

Jane brought him into the fold by asking what his favorite conspiracy theory was, and Adrian didn’t take a beat to think about it or pretend that the question surprised him: his favorite conspiracy theory was that he had a secret twin. With every new film he made, he explained, speculation erupted online as to which twin had done the work.

“That’s creepy,” Burt said. “I don’t think I’ve heard that theory.”

“The worst part is, I think my therapist believes it,” Adrian said. “I feel like she’s always trying to trick me, always quizzing me to see if I remember this or that from a previous session.”

“Why don’t you fire her?”

“Because she’s really good. She helps me keep the right boundaries between my characters and my true self.”

Maria and Debbie met eyes over the cake. Neither of them found the concept of therapy interesting—they knew this about each other. Debbie, besides despising the idea of self-knowledge, believed that she was too complicated for therapy; Maria felt the opposite, that one needed an interesting personality to take to a shrink and that she didn’t have one. Her dreams didn’t contain sophisticated layers of meaning, for example. Before a trip, she dreamed that she was packing a suitcase. Every time she quit smoking, she had pleasant dreams in which she smoked.

“I think that’s more of a rumor than a conspiracy theory,” Katherine said, about Adrian’s secret twin.

“What’s the difference?”

“I’ve always wondered how rumors start,” Jane said.

They thought about it as a group. Did a rumor start the moment someone came up with a story? The powerful men in an office, the bored children behind a tree? Or did it start only once a certain number of strangers had heard it? What was that number? It had to be tricky, launching a rumor into the world which you knew would get warped and amended, something whose nature it was to be distorted. The main beats of the story had to be foolproof. The first people you told it to had to be picked with utmost care. Burt wondered how many rumors got nipped in the bud—for every successful one, how many failed to take off?

“And why did the rumor that I have a twin make it?” Adrian asked. “What’s so fascinating about that?”

Maria figured that he wasn’t comfortable when a conversation strayed from him for too long.

“Are you kidding?” Ervin said. “Two Adrian Kerrys! That’s the definition of hope for the ladies.”

“And the gentlemen,” Katherine added. “Adrian is quite popular among the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”

They agreed that rumors, like conspiracy theories, played on hope. Hope that there was always more to uncover, more to life than they’d been told, more meaning. More life. Everything had to be more than it was, to have a secret layer that only truly enlightened people could see. Even the darkest of conspiracy theories held a promise.

“I guess I can see the hope in the twin theory,” Debbie admitted. “Or even in Roswell. But where’s the promise in flat earth?”

“Oh, Lord. Not this again.”

“I’m serious! Who would feel better if we suddenly were to find out that the earth is, indeed, flat?”

“The hope is to discover that everyone has been lying to you,” Katherine said. “Which then gives you an explanation as to why your life sucks. The hope is to put the blame on someone else.”

“It gives you a chance to give up, too,” Jane added. “If everything you were told is a lie, then you’re free to give up on the sheep life you’ve been living and start anew. It’s the ultimate fantasy.”

“I don’t have that fantasy,” Burt said. “Why does everyone always want to quit what they’re doing?”

“I don’t know, Einstein, why did you quit med school? Because it’s hard!”

“That’s not why I quit,” Burt said.

“Everything’s fun for a minute, then it gets hard,” Jane insisted.

Maria wanted to ask why Burt had quit med school, but Adrian jumped in before she could.

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“I just played a heart surgeon in an indie film,” he said. “I observed a couple surgeries back in May, to prepare for the role. That stuff is wild.”

Maria’s mastectomy had been in May, and though she knew it wasn’t her surgery that Adrian had attended, she became uncomfortable at the thought that it could have been.

“What type of surgery did you observe?” she asked.

Adrian was going for another slice of cake.

“Just a couple valve replacements,” he said.

“Did you have to ask for the patients’ consent?”

“They were so psyched to let me watch.”

Maria struggled to find a response to this. She glanced in Katherine’s direction for help (Was her boyfriend serious? Did he really think that his presence had made open-heart surgery better for the patients?), but Katherine was focussed on the new slice of cake on Adrian’s plate.

“I’m going out for a cigarette,” Maria ended up saying, and her friends looked at one another. Were they supposed to stop her? She’d never been a heavy smoker, but after her diagnosis they’d all been relieved to hear that she’d quit.

“You sure you want to do that?” Jane asked. “I didn’t know you’d taken it up again.”

“I’ll come out with you for one,” Adrian said.

From the balcony, which was right off the dining room, they could’ve kept participating in the conversation, but Maria slid the glass door shut behind them, which muted her friends. She needed to be away from everyone for a minute. That was, in fact, the main reason she’d started smoking again—a cigarette was an excuse to get out. People, even nonsmokers, understood that a smoker needed to take a cigarette break once in a while. What they seldom knew was that the break was also one that the smoker was taking from them. She resented Adrian for following her out.

“Can I ask you something?” he said, lighting Maria’s cigarette before his. She didn’t like it when people lit her cigarettes for her—lighting your own cigarette was half the fun.

“Ask away,” she said, then looked down at the street, three floors below.

“What do you think Kat sees in me?”

Maria wondered what it might feel like to be so self-involved. She doubted it could be all that pleasant.

“Katherine is pretty private,” she said, unsure why it felt important to use Kat’s whole name. “We don’t really talk about these things.”

“What do you talk about?”

Maria thought about it for a moment. The past few weeks, they’d mostly talked about Maria’s apartment. She wanted Kat to help her redesign it—she couldn’t stand the way it looked anymore, the sad eggshell-colored walls, the smooth kitchen cabinets.

“Neither of us talks very much,” she said.

The wind in the trees made a sound that reminded her of the hospital, the pillow they’d given her there. Whenever she’d turned her head, the pillow had made this unnerving sound, something between a ruffle and a squeak, like it was filled with Styrofoam bits.

“We did talk about you once,” she remembered. “I asked her about actors, if she thought it was easier for actors to accept the idea of death, because their youth had been recorded on film, their energy preserved forever.”

“Forever?” Adrian said. “Who believes in that?”

He said he didn’t think humans were going to last very much longer. His youth, as Maria had put it, would exist on film for a while, but soon no one would be left to watch it.

“All humans fantasize that their generation will be the last,” Maria said.

“Believe me, I’m aware. I work in Hollywood. Every other script I get is an end-of-the-world story. The movie I’m shooting right now is an end-of-the-world story.” Maria showed no curiosity about the plot, so Adrian went on: “I didn’t say we were going to be the last. Maybe humans will stick around for thousands and thousands of years, but it’s a known fact that we’ll disappear at some point. We don’t know how yet, that’s the whole thrill, but we know that we will. And then what difference will it make that I was once young and did my own stunts in ‘Last Pursuit’? Or that I was in the film adaptation of ‘Cat’s Cradle’?”

Maria had never seen any of Adrian’s movies. She didn’t suspect they were very good.

“I think, after someone dies, there’s solace to be found in moving images,” she said. “For the family, at least.”

Adrian said that she might be right. His mother had died when he was young, and he found it sad sometimes that there was no footage of her, only a few photos, and photos didn’t help you remember someone as well as home videos did.

“What did your mother die of?” Maria asked.

“Cancer.”

“What kind?”

He hesitated to say it.

“The kind you had.”

So, Kat had told him a bit about her. Maria looked away from the street and at Adrian, but she couldn’t make out his expression. There were no lights on the balcony, and his face was turned toward the moon and a flock of birds heading for a warmer climate.

“I wonder if birds also have conspiracy theories,” Adrian said. He’d read somewhere that people who studied birdsong had noticed slight changes in a flock’s repertoire after certain migrations, as if bird stories and vocabulary were amended according to what they’d learned from a trip. “I wonder if they have gossip.”

“Do you like birds?”

“Not really,” he said. “They creep me out a bit.”

“Me, too,” Maria said.

Especially since dead birds had started showing up on the sidewalks again, she added, as they did at this time of year. She’d seen her first dead warbler of the season just the day before, and that always felt like a bad omen. She couldn’t understand why migratory birds insisted on flying through Chicago on their way south. Studies had shown that Chicago was the most dangerous place for them. Every fall, they got confused by the lights and reflections. Every fall, thousands of them hit windows and died. It seemed as if their birdsong should’ve included “Avoid Chicago” by now, she told Adrian. “Avoid Chicago at all cost.”

“But maybe Chicago is part of their mythology,” he objected. “Maybe their vocabulary does include something about the dangers of Chicago, and they know something bad might happen there, but it has to be part of the journey. Like, they know that it’s dangerous the way we know that smoking and drinking are dangerous. We still do it.”

The wind in the leaves made that Styrofoam sound again. Maria shivered. When she came home from the hospital, she threw away all her pillows; she’d ended up not using the noisy hospital one, and so she realized that pillows weren’t necessary for sleep, as she’d been led to believe they were since childhood. That the human need for pillows was just another lie.

“The real question, though,” Adrian said, “is, do birds know that they’re dinosaurs? That they’ve been around so much longer than us? Do they have any clue?”

Maria found it odd, this shift to dinosaurs. Adrian’s commitment, since he’d stepped out on the balcony, to talk about the nothingness of humanity, the specks of dust they all were, made her question if he treated every change of locale as a new scene. He’d seemed so interested in himself back at the table.

“I used to wonder about that, too,” she admitted. “I used to wonder if birds carried some kind of collective memory of the asteroid.”

“Right? We always talk about the species that were wiped out, we mourn the T. rexes and the brontosauruses, but when I was a kid I was obsessed with the ones that remained, the birds and the turtles. The fungi. I always wondered what it must’ve been like for them, to survive all those years alone in the dark. If they carried any sense of responsibility, or guilt. I think they did. I think they still might. Maybe that’s why I find it hard to look at them for too long. They embody a form of regret—what the world could’ve been.”

Maria thought his last line cheesy, and stilted—something he might have read in a bad script. But then maybe it was hard not to be cheesy when you talked about birds.

“My parents believed that the world was six thousand years old,” she said.

They might have also believed that birds merely sang, she realized now, were constantly cutely singing—not alerting one another to potential dangers, not retelling old stories and cautionary tales.

“Six thousand years is still a good chunk of time,” Adrian said. “It’s still a frightening amount to consider.”

Maria thought that was a nice thing to say. Or maybe it was condescending to her parents. She couldn’t tell. Her cigarette was almost finished, and she didn’t want to go back inside thinking about her parents, or about time, how much there had been and how much was left. She asked Adrian what it was that he saw in Katherine.

Adrian turned toward the window, as if he needed to look at his girlfriend to remember what he liked about her. She and Debbie were animated in conversation, Debbie making hand gestures like Let me stop you right there, Katherine leaning forward to say what she was going to say.

“Kat . . . she doesn’t think about this stuff,” Adrian said. “She doesn’t think about geological eras, what she’s bigger or smaller than. She’s content. It’s an amazing thing to see.”

Maria wondered if he knew about the metabolism-tracking device. It didn’t seem to be on the table anymore. Perhaps Kat had hidden it before he arrived.

Katherine broke up with Adrian before the end of his first week in Chicago. Back at her place after filming a stunt in which his character was thrown through a bay window, he’d talked for too long about his nostalgia for sugar glass, a type of prop that had been replaced by something called breakaway glass. He just didn’t like the resin in the breakaway glass as much. The stunts weren’t as fun. Katherine couldn’t find it in her to pretend to care. The split was amicable. Adrian moved into Soho House that very night.

He was supposed to spend the next few days filming action scenes on Lower Wacker Drive, but heavy rain flooded it, and production adjusted the schedule: a monologue that Adrian had been dreading was moved up by three weeks. He was now expected to give it to the camera in about an hour.

“You’re right,” he said to the mirror in his dressing room. “I am a physicist.”

Would the audience believe this? Well, Adrian reasoned, they would already have been asked to buy the idea that, after Russia tested secret new weapons in Siberia, the earth had started spinning faster on its axis.

“I understand the science,” he went on. “I know what is happening. What I don’t know is how to explain it to my kid. I don’t know how to tell my kid that if the earth keeps spinning faster and faster, that if the numbers keep rising at the pace we’ve been seeing, it won’t just be satellites going off track, it won’t just be shorter days and constant jet lag, tsunamis and plants dying and horses going mad. If my projections are correct, we’ll reach terminal acceleration in a week. We’ll become weightless, which will be fun, sure, but only for a split second, before we start flying around like bloody—literally bloody—confetti. We’ll hit the walls in our houses and die, we’ll collide with buildings if we’re outside, or trees, or other bodies, already dead bodies, just floating in the air. Is that what I should tell my kid? How do I get him ready for this? I’m a physicist, yes, but I’m a father first. Now, tell me, what equations can I solve to prepare my boy for this kind of death?”

Later in the script, Adrian’s character did have a talk with his son, another twenty lines he wasn’t looking forward to learning, especially given how much he disliked the child actor they’d cast to play the son. The kid had been chosen for his resemblance to Adrian, supposedly, but Adrian couldn’t see it, was insulted that production hadn’t found a better match.

His assistant knocked on the door. They were waiting for him on set.

Walking to the soundstage, Adrian heard a flapping noise and looked up at the thirty-five-foot ceilings. He spotted two pigeons amid the rigging, looking down at the set. Their puffy chests brought to mind plump ladies at the opera, passing judgment from the comfort of a private box. He wasn’t fond of pigeons, but seeing birds where they shouldn’t be always cheered him for a moment. There was security to go through to get into Cinespace, but the pigeons hadn’t bothered with it. Maybe they’d take the El and go to an indoor mall later, or to the airport, or to the movies. He’d never seen a bird in a movie theatre, but it had to have happened.

The makeup artist did some touch-ups to his forehead, and Adrian tried to focus on his lines, to get in the zone. The only thing he liked about the script was a scene, much later on, in which his character prepares for the erosion of gravitational power by strapping pillows against his and his kid’s chests, arms, and legs. He looked forward to shooting that scene, and the ones that would follow, in which he’d hang from cables in front of a green screen, padded in pillows. He hadn’t known Maria when he first read the script (he hadn’t even known Katherine), and he would only ever think of her once more: when the time came to shoot that pillow scene. When they’d gone back inside after their cigarette, Maria had told the table about her newfound discovery that people didn’t need pillows to sleep. She presented her act of throwing away all her pillows as a grand cathartic gesture, a step toward freedom, but her friends looked troubled by it. She couldn’t go to bed without pillows, they said. They all seemed to believe it was unthinkable.

Adrian stood on his mark and waited for the director’s go. The pigeons were still up there, but they were restless now, they seemed to have sensed that something was about to happen. Perhaps they were debating flying down toward the set for front-row seats.

The set today was a physics lab. There were many fine details, but there was also a gigantic periodic table of the elements hanging on the wall. Adrian didn’t think that a real physicist would have a poster of the periodic table in his lab, but his doubts had been brushed away. “It communicates,” the director said. ♦

This is drawn from “One Sun Only: Stories.”

In “Understanding the Science,” your story in this week’s issue, a group of friends are sitting around a dinner table in Chicago, celebrating the fact that Maria’s cancer is now in remission. The conversation is general, and maybe a little boring—Maria, certainly, feels a bit disaffected. A spark comes when Katherine’s boyfriend, Adrian, enters the scene, because he’s a famous actor. Though the story begins in Maria’s point of view, it starts to subtly shift, and ends in Adrian’s perspective. How did you think about who is telling this story, and whose voice—or voices—we should trust?

As is always the case when I write anything, I didn’t know what problems the story would pose until it started posing them. I truly believed that “Understanding the Science” would focus on Maria, and that we would get to know more about her brush with death and get access to her wisdom (or her disappointment at not having gained more of it, maybe), but then her character kept resisting me. She didn’t want to be known. She became a sort of Bartleby-like figure, and I felt I had to respect that. I was treating her the same as her friends in the story were treating her, a little bit too reverently. I expected everything she said to have deeper meaning just because of what she’d been through, and it was an unfair weight to put on her. So, I let her be herself: not a saint, a little judgmental, and mostly quiet. She thinks her friends’ conversation is boring, for example, but she doesn’t offer a change of topic. When Adrian comes in, though, things start shifting, as you said. He captures everyone’s attention—Maria’s included, even if she would be reluctant to admit it. When the energy of a story starts morphing like this, I think it’s always a good idea to follow it where it wants to go. Especially since, as a reader, I tend to like it when stories and novels don’t behave the way that they should.

The people at the dinner party idly talk about conspiracy theories and rumors before the story shifts into a more philosophical mode, with questions about hope and meaning. Was the dinner-table debate always central to the story, or did it evolve as you wrote?

I think the initial impulse for the story was to try to stage the difficulty many of us encounter when it comes to speaking about big topics (death, fear, faith, etc.), perhaps especially with the people we’re close with. Maria went through cancer, but all that her friends can talk about in her presence are problems at work or new trends in self-care. I like writing that kind of dialogue. I like an elephant in the room. I thought most of the story would be this dinner conversation. I saw the discussion around conspiracy theories as a step toward touching on more personal things without seeming to, though, because, in the process of breaking down another person’s beliefs, you accidentally (or not) shine a light on some of your own. So that was fun. And then Adrian comes in and kind of blows things up. He’s less afraid to dig into certain topics. There is a question of how honest he is, though. Is he being himself, or, as a trained actor, playing the role of outsider shaking things up?

In the final scene, Adrian prepares for a role in a movie whose script—with the Earth spinning faster and bodies becoming “bloody confetti”—seems to echo the story’s focus on mortality. What was it like to play around with those parallels?

At first, I thought that last part would be real: that in the reality of the story, on the day following the dinner party, the Earth would actually start spinning faster on its axis, throwing everything off balance. But then I had Adrian, who is an actor, and it felt more interesting to make up the movie he starred in. More fun and less morbid, too. If it was all a movie, I could spare the rest of my characters, have Maria, Katherine, et al. safe at home while Adrian prepared to tackle the end of the world once again, for work.

This story comes from “One Sun Only,” a collection, which comes out early next year. How does “Understanding the Science” fit into the collection’s preoccupations?

When “Understanding the Science” starts, we’re at a polite dinner party among old college friends in Chicago—we don’t expect to end up on a big-budget movie shoot a few pages later. At some point, the axis of the story shifts. I think every story in “One Sun Only,” in different ways, tries to capture these moments where the ground moves beneath our feet.

Although the stories in the collection are distinct from one another (different narrators, different places and perspectives), many also share a number of concerns—about work, language, grief, the mystery of time, the mystery of family, which only deepens over time. Beyond that, none of the stories seeks to simplify the experience of life. None offers lessons on how to live. . . . I’m a reader before I’m a writer and, as a reader, I want to be moved and surprised by how other people think, how other people talk, and I’m always hoping that some kind of magic will operate on me. I want to experience and later be able to point to a moment or remember a line that stopped me in my tracks. That happens with my favorite J. D. Salinger stories, and with Harold Brodkey, José Emilio Pacheco, Don DeLillo . . . I don’t know if it happens with my stories (as their writer, it’s impossible to know), but I try my best to make it happen, to make room for that kind of thrill, that electricity. ♦